The Brooks-Coulson trial was very narrowly focused on the hacking issue. It did not include the earlier police inquiries into the News of the World’s (NoW) involvement in blagging confidential records and bribing corrupt police for information in the late 1980s and 1990s. The jury was not shown Brooks’ evidence (no doubt a slip on her part, telling the truth) to the parliamentary media committee in March 2003 that her journalists had paid police for information in the past, which is of course a criminal offence. Ironically Select committee evidence is not admissible in court because of the rules protecting parliamentary privilege. Above all, the trial excluded the illicit and ruthless use of power by which the Murdoch press, and especially Brooks, destroyed individuals and suborned governments. Continue reading
Tagged with Murdoch
Dealing with the Murdoch empire requires far more than jailing Coulson
Coulson is only a medium-sized cog in the web of industrial scale phone-hacking, lying, deceit, and intimidation that is Murdoch’s News International. If this was any other company rather than one of themselves, the newspapers would be raising a hue and cry demanding a full public inquiry, resignations or sackings of key executives in the boardroom, and the break-up and restructuring of a disgraced and discredited corporation. Continue reading
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Cameron forced to backtrack over Leveson
ameron has just, shortly before 1pm today, conceded a deal over the Leveson proposals for press regulation which provides for everything that the Labour & LibDem parties were demanding. He did that, not because he believes it, but because he knew he would lose the vote and will do anything to avoid the humiliation of a parliamentary defeat. It is a triumph for Ed Miliband and his Labour team who have (rightly) not tried to rub his face in it – however much he might deserve it, given his back-room cabals with the newspaper publishers to block a new democratic settlement at any cost – but have consented to tease out an all-party agreement as being the best solution, so long as it contains all the elements needed to ensure that an abusive press can be effectively held to account. And this agreement does contain that. Continue reading
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Leveson should not apply to the not-for-profit blogosphere
Mark Ferguson raises an important issue which has been neglected in the last minute deal-making and it is important albeit not what most politicians are currently hacked-off about — on the important question of whether the deal meets the requirement of adequate statutory backing see the Spectator or Labour List, although be warned that they broadly reflect the (convenient) stance of the Leaders of their own side. Nor is it the question of media ownership, which politicians fail to raise but Mark Seddon does so here.
The issue is the internet – to which Leveson devoted just one page in his very lengthy report, though he has since spoken about the issue. In the long run, when the importance of print mdeia diminishes, it is what matters most and it concerns not only the so-called freedom of the press (aka the unregulated freedom of the rich press barons) but the more important freedom of speech. Continue reading
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Did the Sunday Times want to damage Huhne (& Pryce)?
Chris Huhne & Vicky Pryce would not be in prison today if the Sunday Times had not handed over information to the Police from a confidential source. Nick Cohen in an excellent piece at the Spectator rightly blames Isabel Oakeshott, its political editor, for breaking journalists’ first law and, he adds, their one moral principle to never betray a source, claiming that Vicky Pryce “had double-crossed me…. revealing all to a rival newspaper“. Continue reading